knock on the table.
It answers — solid.
Hard, certain, undeniably there.
So is the chair beneath you.
So is the hand you knocked with.
And almost none of it
is actually there at all.
Everything you've ever held
is built from atoms.
And an atom is
almost entirely empty.
If one atom were blown up
to the size of a cathedral,
its heart — the nucleus,
holding nearly all its weight —
would be a single grain of rice
floating at the center.
Everything else
is space.
one single atom of you.
the faint haze is its electrons —
a blur, never in one place.
now we fall toward the center.
through the emptiness.
still falling.
still nothing but space.
there. that speck of light —
almost all your weight,
in almost none of the room.
The numbers are almost rude.
You are something like
99.9999 percent empty space —
and so is everyone you love.
If you squeezed all that emptiness
out of every human alive,
packing the solid part together —
the entire human race
would fit inside
a single sugar cube.
So why does the table
stop your hand?
Why doesn't your body
fall straight through the floor,
two clouds of mostly-nothing
passing through each other
like ghosts?
Because something invisible
is holding it all apart —
force.
press your hand to the wall.
it feels solid. final.
zoom in on the place
where you 'touch.'
the atoms of your hand
drift toward the atoms of the wall —
and stop.
a sliver of space apart.
their fields push back.
you have never
touched anything in your life.
Every touch you've ever felt
was this.
The warmth of a hand in yours
is not skin meeting skin.
It is the electric fields
of your atoms
pressing against theirs —
two storms of force
that come achingly close
and never quite arrive.
You have spent your whole life
almost touching the world.
So what holds you together,
if not stuff?
Fields. Forces. Patterns.
You are less a thing
and more a standing wave —
a shape the universe is holding
in invisible hands,
steady, every instant,
so that a cloud of almost-nothing
can stand up,
and look around,
and call itself you.
Even atom 738 —
the traveler inside you —
is almost entirely empty.
A speck of weight
lost in its own vast space.
And the very same force
that keeps it from collapsing
holds the planets to the sun,
and the stars inside the dark.
the universe uses one set of hands
to hold the galaxies
and to hold you.
You are almost nothing.
A whisper of matter,
a vast amount of space,
and a web of forces
singing it all into a shape.
Not a stone. A song.
Mostly empty —
and yet entirely real,
entirely here,
entirely held.